Writing
Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.
An Iranian official (Reza Behboodi) tries to find husbands for a group of young Kurdish women who are threatening to kill themselves because of the scarcity of marriageable men Due to wars, bad economy, and politics.
Iranian musicians Negar and Ashkan look for band members to play at a London concert ... and the visa that allows them to leave Tehran to do so.
For Nariman the pilot and Helly Luv, an aspiring singer, being Kurdish is not just an identity; it’s a full-time job. Nariman needs young recruits for his flying school—a goal made darkly comic since he just survived a plane crash—while the illustrious Helly collects Kalashnikov rifles and a sea of Kurdish flags to produce her music video. In the midst of another war against the Kurdish people, Nariman reminisces about a long-lost love, and Helly finds herself connecting with Kurdish children at a refugee camp near the Syrian border, who are in urgent need of inspiration and hope.
A police officer finds himself haunted by a traumatic childhood memory as he searches for a missing man in the rugged mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, in this striking feature debut by Batin Ghobadi.
A group of female art students pay a visit to a village in order to take photographs. A gust of wind blows one of the student’s veils and carries it away. The girl hurries off after her veil and is not far away from the village when she comes across a dead man.
In 2015, the Syrian boy Aylan appeared dead on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey. The image shocked and alerted the world to the refugee crisis. The film imagines what would have happened to this child until the day of his death, when the boat in which he was with a family heading to Greece turned on the high seas. The story arises from a moment of magical realism, in which Aylan's spirit emerges from his body and wanders back to the world of refugees and those provoked by war, who escape to escape for a better life.
